French Music in Britain 1830–1914 Paul J Rodmell

Abstract

Given the long-standing contribution of the ‘Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ series to research on the fabled ‘Land without Music’, it comes as a shock to realize just how many basic questions still need answers. Paul Rodmell’s fourth book in the Routledge series, which has published forty-one titles since 2001, tackles French stage and concert music—repertories all but absent in general accounts of British musical life dominated by Italian and then German composers. To what extent, Rodmell asks, were French repertories present within the professional operatic and concert activity of London and the British provinces? How were they adapted to fit local circumstances; and which genres or composers were either influential or failed to make an impact? What did the Frenchness of French music mean to English audiences, and how did such meanings change over time? To answer these questions Rodmell turns to press reviews first and foremost. As a foundation for such discussion, patient searching of newspapers, alongside other printed sources, lies behind his chronologically ordered appendix of first performances of French music in Britain (pp. 201–20), which alone counts as a highly suggestive document illustrating changing patterns of British exposure to performances of French music. Obituaries of key figures, and entries on French musicians in Grove’s Dictionary, offer a rounding-out of contemporary discourse on French music, though in the light of recent literature on the history of listening in Britain I was surprised at the omission of programme notes as a potential source of aesthetic and pedagogical commentary, and at the relatively slight attention given to caricatures and other types of illustration included within the text.